08/30/2013

The Chaos Computer Club's Past Links to the KGB and Present Links to WikiLeaks, Assange, and Snowden

In online virtual worlds and MMORPGs, in forums and news sites, the role of groups is hugely important for hackers, Anonymous, Occupy sympathizers and anarchists of all types: groups keep the memory of the past and the projection of the future; they keep the lore and the learning and the memes; they are there to return to when you are banned and have to re-spawn and create an alt; you can load up your griefing objects into your inventory again from mules or sandboxes on your new account precisely because groups exist. Often, the people who hold the group together and keep it as a virtual or even real institution of sorts themselves never commit hacking or law-breaking of any type precisely so they can hold the group -- but they're there to victory-dance with you when you want to celebrate your exploits, sometimes taking the screenshots...

As much as they live online on IRC channels or encrypted chatrooms or Twitter or Pastebin or Ycombinator, hackers like to meet "in real" too because that's how they build trust. And there is some knowledge and secrets that can only be passed by an actual real-world meet-up.

ITS NAME DESCRIBES IT

The Chaos Computer Club, nearing its 30th birthday (don't miss it!), is older than the Internet as most of us know it and dates back to the phone-phreaking days of hackers breaking into public and private phone systems to extract information, particularly codes or credit cards to use to do more communications via phones - and often "just because they can" -- which is the credo for a lot of hacking.

You may not have realized when you saw Jacob Appelbaum speak at 29C3 on YouTube that the funny name meant 29th Congress of the Chaos Computer Club in Germany. In this speech, titled "Not My Department," he openly recruits those computer programmers who are working for governments in what he views as "surveillance states" in the West to come "from the dark side" (as he sees their lawful activity) into the "light" -- the dark underground world of anarchist coders he represents.

At the time of the speech, in December 2012, he may have already known that Edward Snowden existed, because Snowden supposedly first contacted Glenn Greenwald and then Laura Poitras that time -- and she would have undoubtedly contacted Appelbaum and asked him to help her verify Snowden's claims and encrypt the hacked files involved. Perhaps he even helped create a wish list of what would be best to hack.

But looking at this speech superficially as just one of the literally hundreds of speeches Appelbaum has given all around the world at various hacker fests misses an important point: the Chaos Computer Club has been central to WikiLeaks, to Julian Assange and his colleagues, and to the Snowden affair and his defection to Moscow.

And, as they say, perhaps it is no accident, comrades, because the CCC has a history of dealing with the KGB, even selling the KGB hacked files from Western governments for drugs and money. This sensational past is rarely discussed when WikiLeaks is covered, and when the question is raised as to how WikiLeaks and Russian intelligence are related. The KGB, of course, has a long history of working through leftist German movements, publishing houses and newspapers and taking advantage of the extensive ties between Germany and Russia throughout history.

LEIGH AND HARDING ON CCC

In their book WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy, David Leigh and Luke Harding devote only one page to the Chaos Computer Club and its Congress, as if it were just some obscure nerdy coders' groups not worthy of a second look. They note that Julian Assange and his now estranged colleague WikiLeaks colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg met at the 24th Congress in 2007. Ultimately, Domscheit-Berg was to break with Assange.

It is the foundation formed by the CCC founder Wau Holland-Moritz, now deceased, that forms the basis for WikiLeaks fund-raising to this day at a time when US payments processors refuse to take donations for WikiLeaks because it is the subject of a grand jury investigation involving the theft of classified government files.

Leigh and Harding write:

Chaos Computer Club members at the Berlin Congress such as Domscheit-Berg along with his Dutch hacker colleague Rop Gonggrijp had mature talents that proved to be crucial to the development of Assange's guerilla project.

They go on to explain that Assange tried to shed the hacker label himself, despite his own past prosecution for hacking, saying it was "mostly deployed by the Russian mafia to steal your grandmother's bank accounts."

Oh, not just the Russian mafia. The Russian state, which is commingled with the mafia, of course, which we know from Luke Harding's other books. But they leave it at that in this book.

ANDY GREENBERG ON CCC

Andy Greenberg, the staff writer for Forbes who writes about cybersecurity, hackers, cryptography and the Internet (his book contains a cryptogram that three hackers have already broken), likely understands hackers more than these other two journalists despite their foreign and domestic affairs chops. He is famous for getting an early and long interview of Assange himself for Forbes. And for his book This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information, published in 2012, Greenberg went and spent a lot of time hanging out with the German hackers, even attending the CCC, and of all things, even stumbling on the famous WikiLeaks co-conspirator who goes by the name of The Architect and learning his identity (which in true crypto-kid fashion, he doesn't reveal to us).

As much as I appreciate Greenberg's skillful reporting, to get to his sources, and to gain his proximity, he has to "get in" with these hackers and gain their trust -- which is why he always seems rather admiring of them even as he occasionally criticizes them. I used to think this was a reporter's pose to get the story; I no longer think that. It's just not that he endlessly reports and never judges, if the alibi is that reporters aren't supposed to judge; it's that he too often celebrates, and that's simply unacceptable in a moral universe.

But the Chaos Computer Club isn't a moral universe, except in the sense of "thieves' law" as in the Russian prisons and mafias.

JACOB APPELBAUM, THE CCC AND ASSANGE

Greenberg has a good deal more material on the CCC in his book, and in the chapter titled "The Onion Routers," he covers Jacob Appelbaum's connection to the group.

When Appelbaum returned from New Orleans, his tour through two levels of hell had left him more committed than ever to the liberating powers of technology. But he had yet to find the community that would be his own cypherpunks, the crypto-obsessed peers who would enwrap him in a larger movement and push him to greater feats of crypto-anarchy.

That group would be the Chaos Computer Club.

In many ways, the CCC had progressed years ahead of Tim May and Eric Hughes' crypt0-liberation movement in California. Founded by the Germany hacker luminary Wau Holland in 1981, the hamburgand erlin-based nonprofit had been demonstrating the insecurity of public computer systems as early as 1984, when its hackers used the home terminal system created by the German postal system to transfer the equivalent of $50,000 from a bank to the CCC's accounts. (The money was given back in a public ceremony the next day.) With a true survelilance state looming just over the Berlin Wall, privacy, antiauthoritarianism, and the need for strong crypto had been steep into the group's core.

That sort of statement is exactly the sort of thing that exasperates so with Greenberg's writing. Just because they were next door to East Germany doesn't mean this group did anything to liberate East Germany; their focus then as now was myopically on the West and the "surveillance state" they feared and loathed was the US and its allies in Western Europe.

A year after his father's death in December before Christmas, Appelbaum flew to the CCC in Berlin, writes Appelbaum, engrossed with "the same problem that had troubled Julian Assange years earlier, one central to any activist who believes in the power of cryptography: how to keep encrypted data encrypted, even when authorities are standing over the user, rubber hose in hand, demanding the key." (The reference is to a program invented by Assange in 1997 actually titled "Rubberhose" that was written so that no torturer would be motivated to torture to get the key.)

In his talk that year, Appelbaum derided Apple for its lack of security and then evidently independently came to the problem of "violent key extraction" which was Assange's invention. Tackling the problem of a torturer who is never satisfied "Alice" or "Bob" have told the truth, he suggested that there be Mutually Assured Information Destruction (MAID) so that if the victim, in prison, doesn't check into their account, their keys automatically delete and the torturer knows that. One hopes.

"That drew Appelbaum into Assange's circle albeit indirectly," says Greenberg; another hacker, Ralf-Philipp Winmann, who had developed Rubberhose with Assange earlier, debated Appelbaum at the Congress and then they agreed to meet later.

Writes Greenberg about the first connection between Assange and Appelbaum:

Appelbaum became a CCC regular, and Assange would attend the next year to introduce a project he was working on: WikiLeaks

Friends say they met at that wintry Berlin conference [emphasis added]. Their paths must have felt uncannily parallel: broken, wayward childhoods. IQs beyond those of the hated authorities that tried to exert power over their lives and a belief in the redemptive power of cryptography to defeat those forces.

Sigh. You would never catch me writing a paragraph like that! Frustratingly, Greenberg doesn't directly give the year in this account but if we are to believe Wikipedia, it was 2007 -- meaning Appelbaum's first contact with the CCC was 2006.

APPELBAUM IN BED WITH ASSANGE

And then he writes this, which also can be used to figure the first date as 2006:

By Appelbaum's fourth year at the conference, they [Assange and he] had become close. Appelbuam told me he woke up on New Year's Day after the Twenty-Sixth Chaos Communications Congress in bed with Assange and two women. "That's how we rolled in 2010," he says smiling. (He later clarifies that they had busied themselves the night before with programming, not sex, and slept in different beds. "I can dream," he adds.)

He told Greenberg this was "the start of a good friendship." Indeed.

So Jacob Appelbaum has been in bed with Assange, perhaps only figuratively, for nearly seven years. That's plenty of time to plan and execute many things, including quite possibly the recruitment of an NSA contractor to hack the United States and then defect to Russia. Appelbaum did not spring into the story of Snowden suddenly only in the spring of this year; Laura Poitras had relied on him for years to help her with crypto, ever since they were both traveling to Iraq at the same time in 2004-2005.

Greenberg goes on to attend a Chaos Computer Congress in a tent in the mud and rain in an abandoned East German army base -- fitting. He tells the fascinating story of interviewing Domscheit-Berg just as he is trying to launch a leaks site in competition with WikiLeaks, from which he has departed bitterly on bad terms in September 2010, with a left-wing German newspaper Die Tagezeitung. But it's a flop, and Tag's editor Reinter Metzger leaves "extremely pissed off." Ultimately, in a series of dramas, involving claims that Domscheit-Berg took files that "belonged" to that info-leaking liberator WikiLeaks gang that had stolen them in the first place, the CCC ends up holding a council and expelling Domscheit-Berg, after he is interrogated by a number of hacker elders including the Electronic Frontier Foundation's John Gillmore. Among the judges who rules to expel Domscheit-Berg (and later, take him back in after a sufficient period of exile) is Andy Muller-Maguhn -- who, along with Jacob Appelbaum, was co-author with Julian Assange of Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet. Muller-Maguhn accused Domscheit-Berg of working with Western intelligence agencies -- a charge D-B laughed off in an interview with Greenberg, making a counter-charge that Muller-Maguhn himself had relationships with government agencies through sales in his CryptoPhone company.

Greenberg goes into more detail than most about the internal WikiLeaks crisis that led first to an accidental leak of the key, then a download of all the documents, then to The Architect and Domscheit-Berg destroying the files by throwing away the keys to them.

While Greenberg nails it by calling Camp, as the hackers call CCC a "colder, wetter Burning Man for the radical geek elite," he does not describe its ancient history involving the KGB, when a young German hacker Karl Koch and others contacted the KGB on their own, and sold their hacked files for money and drugs -- Koch was said to be a cocaine addict.

THE CONSPIRACY LOONS' MINEFIELD

To get that sordid story, you have to go to other books and old website archives -- and first try to skirt the minefield of the Wayne Madsen conspiracy sort of stuff -- which as we know is so radioactive that the Guardian deleted an article using this former NSA loon as a source the minute they realized where the story came from. Wayne Madsen believes that the Chaos Computer Club hackers cooperating with the Soviets were under the watch of none other than Robert Hanssen, one of the CIA's most famous defectors to Russia, and that's why they didn't come to light right away. I haven't found that story anywhere else, and it definitely needs checking. Anybody? I have no use for Wayne Madsen and I "get it" about him totally, thanks; I place this link here merely as part of the gorgeous mosaic around this story.

In addition to Wayne Madsen, there's another conspiracy writer, Daniel Estulin, who has written a book, Deconstructing WikiLeaks. He is a Russian emigre from the Soviet era who claims his father was a dissident and that he was tortured and imprisoned by the KGB. I never heard of him, I don't see the name in any Soviet political prisoners' list known at the time or since, and I wonder if the story is true, or at least true in all its elements. Estulin says he and his family fled Russia in 1980. That would have been rare indeed, as the detente period of the 1970s when some Soviet Jews and various dissidents were allowed to leave was pretty much over by then - it was very difficult to get out unless you were a high official allowed to travel. In any event, for what it's worth, Estulin writes in this book -- although Amazon won't let you see the whole page -- that Jacob Appelbaum was in touch with some hacker named Zatko and Dirk Brzezinski of the CCC. To be continued.

It was in 1989 that some computer hackers were suspected of working with foreign intelligence agencies, including the Soviet KGB, to break into western defense computers. Through a link provided by the Chaos Computer Club, a group of German hackers — Karl Koch, aka "Hagbard;" Markus Hess, aka "Urmel;" Hans Heinrich Hubner, aka "Pengo;" and Dirk-Otto Brezinski, aka "DOB" – teamed up with hackers at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and in Melbourne, Australia to penetrate U.S. military computers. It was Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory system administrator Clifford Stoll who first discovered the hackers’ portal into military computers — at the University of Bremen via the German DATEX-P network into Lawrence Berkeley via Tymnet and out into some 400 military computers from the Ramstein Airbase in Germany to Fort Buckner, Okinawa and the OPTIMIS database at the Pentagon. Koch, or "Hagbard," was found burned to death with gasoline in a forest near Celle, West Germany in 1989. Police ruled the death a suicide.

Melbourne, you say? What was the teen-age Assange doing then? And of course you can go back to Clifford Stoll's own book, the Cuckoo's Egg, and the film made of the story at the time, even before the modern Internet, about how a young computer scientist found hackers in government computers who were selling information to the KGB, and eventually, through persistence, persuaded US law-enforcement to catch them.

An interesting aspect of the Cuckoo's Egg gives us a clue as to how the KGB's successor in Russia today, the FSB or its sister agencies, could be doubling up on Snowden and checking his bona fides through their other existing moles in the NSA -- which as I theorized, could be how the Independent story could have happened:

The hacker's name was Markus Hess, and he had been engaged for some years in selling the results of his hacking to the SovietKGB. There was ancillary proof of this when a Hungarianspy
contacted the fictitious SDInet at LBL by mail, based on information he
could only have obtained through Hess (apparently this was the KGB's
method of double-checking to see if Hess was just making up the
information he was selling them).

You can find references to these German hackers in the archives of the Internet's earliest forums.

One of Cliff Stoll's "Wily Hackers" Is Dead (Suicide?) June 5, 1989~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~According to West German publications, the "Wily Hacker" Karl Koch, of Hannover, West Germany, died Friday, June 3, probably by suicide. His body was found burnt (with gasoline) to death, in a forest near Celle (a West German town near Hannover where he committed his hacks, as had been observed by German Post).

Koch was one of the 2 hackers who confessed their role in the KGB hack to the public prosecutors, therewith bringing the case to public attention. As German newspapers report, he probably suffered from a psychic disease: He thought he was permanently observed by alien beings named Illimunates' which tried to kill him. Probably, he had internalized the role of "Captain Hagbard" (his pseudonym in the hacking scene), taken from a U.S. book, who (like him) suffered from supervision by the Illuminates. Police officials evidently think that Koch committed suicide (though it is believed, that there are "some circumstances" which may also support other theories; no precise information about such moments are reported).

According to German police experts, Karl Koch's role in the KGB case as in daily life can properly be understood when reading this unknown book.

Karl Koch a.k.a. "Hagbard," who introduced Hess to hacking, saw there was money to be made by obtaining and selling military information, and he enlisted the aid of three other hackers -- Hans Huebner, a.k.a. "Pengo," Peter Carl, and Dirk Bresinsky -- to help make contacts with the Soviet KGB and make deliveries. Over the course of more than two years, Hess and Hagbard attempted to break into more than 440 U.S. comptuers by guessing at passwords and, once in, recreating the security password file to give themselves "master" access to the computer the next time they entered. All this activity was being observed by Dr. Clifford Stoll in Berkeley, CA, who -- after accidentally discovering Hess's and his friends' efforts -- tried unsuccessfully for most of the two years to get a law enforcement agency interested in investigating the activity.

Although they break-in activity of the hackers was wrong, there was no definable loss: The files being copied and examined by Hess and his friends were unclassified, publicly available files. Hess and the others were not authorized to enter the computers, but current laws did not define what they were doing as offenses. Hagbard got Pengo and Carl to travel to East Berlin and contact the Soviet Agircultural Attache (i.e., the KGB), who paid them in money and cocaine, using a bus locker to make the transfers. Despite selling the printed files to the KGB for thousands of dollars, not one page of copied documents was classified. Hess and Hagbard effectively scammed the KGB into paying for documents they could have obtained openly. Because they were obtained by computer, the KGB apparently was more attracted to them because they pointed out systems that could be exploited.

Note that Herold bends over backwards to try to persuade us that "no harm is done," but she is hardly the judge of that. Unclassified? Really? I'd like a second opinion on that! And she herself trips up her own story -- the real issue is access to the systems, and we don't know everything they did with that...

The
conference assembles computer enthusiasts from around the world for
three days of hacking, discussions, and workshops on topics ranging from
alternative operating systems to TCP/IP penetration to the state of the
hacker ethic.

This year, the mysterious disappearance of German
hacker Boris Floricic -- also known as Tron -- on 17 October and the
discovery of his body in a Berlin park five days later has been Topic A.

Responding to emotional outbursts from Tron's friends calling suicide
out of the question, officer Klaus Ruckschnat reminded the crowd that
the official line was still "apparent suicide." That is, the police have
not yet ruled out the possibility that Tron was murdered.

Padeluun,
a longstanding member of the CCC, gently suggested that "sometimes
things are what they seem." In other words, just as the police weren't
ruling out murder, the CCC should not rule out suicide.

Mueller-Maguhn
outlined the areas of Tron's work that may have got him in trouble with
any number of parties. The young hacker cracked phone cards and digital
set-top boxes for pay TV, and his university dissertation was on
ISDN-related cryptography.

"Tron may have underestimated the
financial value of the information he uncovered," said Mueller-Maguhn.
"He was always direct and honest, but also naive."

Of course, Mueller-Maguhn is still active today, and a co-author and collaborater with Julian Assange. And I cite both these cases of deaths in the CCC although they may have different dynamics precisely because of what they underscore: the interest of this club of brainy and wild hackers in creating encryption schemes to hide from governments, their assault on Western intelligence which they view as thwarting them from their dream of absolute encryption; and the obvious interest of Russian and other anti-Western intelligence services then in their antics.

IS THE KGB ONLY IN THE PAST?

The notion that some members of CCC may have condemned the idea of breaking into protected systems was floated in this account of the KGB story, but I don't see that as an organization, the CCC condemned or expelled any of the people related to Koch's KGB hacking ring -- the way they did Domscheit-Berg when they felt he had gone afoul of their thieves' law. Indeed, I don't see any condemnation of anything regarding Soviet or Russian intelligence and its keen interest in hackers at all (as constantly illustrated by the saturation coverage on RT).

WikiLeaks heckler accounts -- you know, those ankle-biters with 47 followers and brand-new accounts with funny names -- will be quick to say that just because some CCC members hacked for the KGB back in the late 1980s doesn't mean that 30 years later, they are doing so today. Yet I don't see that the CCC ever repudiated this aspect of their past at all and I see them continuing to serve as a nest of interest to the KGB's successors.

That's because on the eve of the German elections, facing opposition and meddling and intriguing from Russia, Merkel is not going to arrest two Americans related to Snowden. Not only would the left eat her alive and the world see her as somehow "anti-Internet freedom," she herself may have her own political reasons to keep the Americans off balance. In fact, Appelbaum and Poitras may have selected Germany as their temporary haven precisely knowing that this political situation meant that they might enjoy a kind of immunity.

DOES THE CCC REPUDIATE ITS KGB HACKERS?

Wired reported in 1998:

Earlier, CCC co-founder Wau Holland shared his personal observations
on a decade and a half of CCC history and controversy. Among its
"accomplishments," the CCC had cracked the German postal network,
planted a Trojan horse in NASA's computer system, and seen the death of
one of its own before.

"In every case," said Holland, "the club has retained its independence. We don't take sides."

Other
conference events this week include a lockpicking contest, a
robot-building contest, and a report on "Hacking the KGB: 10 Years
After."

But if you aren't keeping the KGB out and repudiating the KGB, you are taking sides; the CCC hacks the West, not the East. I believe at the very least they are being used precisely because of their illusion of "independence," but more likely they cynically cooperate with anti-Western Russian intelligence simply because they hate the West more.

Far from being authentically independent, I see CCC as being the site of the launching of the Revenge of the Hackers against Western intelligence agencies -- because they believe there is a war, and a war that they lost -- and now had to fight back in. Of course, when you hear them talk, they sound like hysterical children -- the seas are rising up and drowning their cities, etc. Unlike Greenberg's fanciful depiction of them, however, just because Russia is right next door to these extreme hackers, and causing the lion's share of cyberattacks on their continent damaging their own country's government among others, doesn't mean a thing. They myopically obsess about America -- and of course they may have help in doing so from the KGB's successors.

The relationship to the FSB or GRU that a hackers' club might have today could be conscious and cynical -- for money or for a sense of power or to stick it to the West. It could be done out of arrogance, in the belief that hackers are more clever than big, bureaucratic government intelligence agencies and can always outsmart them. Or it could be unknown to them, as various people slip into their large congresses and camps and meet-ups and slip out again -- there are numerous Russian emigres or Russian citizens now living in Europe -- huge numbers of programmers from Russia have migrated broad to the EU or the US in search of better paying work and a better lifestyle who actually remain aggressively loyal to the Motherland and its military-industrial society which gives them a sense of superiority over wimpy Westerners. It was this milieu that the spy Anna Chapman fluidly and effortlessly penetrated and worked on to reach some of the highest figures in Silicon Valley -- all while the press was thinking of her only as a brainless ginger posting provocative poses of herself on Facebook.

We're likely to see more come out about all this in the coming weeks and months. Other mules may try to contact Appelbaum and Poitras and get caught or victory dance that they weren't caught. More could come out from Snowden with their help again in Der Spiegel, especially to help influence the elections, and not without Russian help.

It's my contention that Assange was recruiting and planning for an NSA leaker and organizing assaults on the NSA before the Snowden affair -- there is the "prefiguring" I documented here and which also piqued Walter Pincus' interest, caused him to link up the dots -- and draw Glenn Greenwald's angry rebuttals.

MENDAX AND VERAX

And at least one author, Maria Bustillos, believes after reading Cypherpunks that Assange was planning the Snowden caper all along. She points out the obvious corrolary between Assange's hacker handle -- Mendax, which means Liar -- and Snowden's handle, Verax, which means Truth-teller. Funny, that.

Assange’s youthful hacker name was Mendax (“lying”), allegedly from
Horace’s phrase “splendide mendax,” or “nobly lying.” It’s impossible to
avoid the impression that Snowden chose his own alias, Verax
(“truthful”) in direct opposition to Assange. There are some strong
parallels between the two men. Both are autodidacts, both lifelong
computer geeks, and the parents of both were divorced. Both write in the
impatient, cringe-makingly pompous style that seems often to afflict
programmers and gamers. (Snowden appears to have posted fairly frequently on the forums of technology website Ars Technica over the last decade or so.)

Bustillos is a fan of the crypto cause -- I'm not. I don't believe in creating a realm of criminality in which these arrogant autodidacts who didn't finish school and have no respect for democracy or institutions get to decide what is encrypted and what is exposed. Of course, I and others may not get a chance to decide any of this and that's what the Wired State is all about.

Additions:

LibertyLynx on Twitter reminded me of the role of Holger Stark, Der Spiegel editor, who has published Appelbaum and Poitras' first interview with Snowden made in May before he announced himself and before Glenn Greenwald's first June 9th article on Snowden's leak.

Holger Stark, head of the German section of Der Spiegel in Berlin,has
been following the work of the Chaos Computer Club since the 1990s and
has been reporting for the past ten years on issues from the world of
security policies and the federal secret service.

Comments

In online virtual worlds and MMORPGs, in forums and news sites, the role of groups is hugely important for hackers, Anonymous, Occupy sympathizers and anarchists of all types: groups keep the memory of the past and the projection of the future; they keep the lore and the learning and the memes; they are there to return to when you are banned and have to re-spawn and create an alt; you can load up your griefing objects into your inventory again from mules or sandboxes on your new account precisely because groups exist. Often, the people who hold the group together and keep it as a virtual or even real institution of sorts themselves never commit hacking or law-breaking of any type precisely so they can hold the group -- but they're there to victory-dance with you when you want to celebrate your exploits, sometimes taking the screenshots...

As much as they live online on IRC channels or encrypted chatrooms or Twitter or Pastebin or Ycombinator, hackers like to meet "in real" too because that's how they build trust. And there is some knowledge and secrets that can only be passed by an actual real-world meet-up.

ITS NAME DESCRIBES IT

The Chaos Computer Club, nearing its 30th birthday (don't miss it!), is older than the Internet as most of us know it and dates back to the phone-phreaking days of hackers breaking into public and private phone systems to extract information, particularly codes or credit cards to use to do more communications via phones - and often "just because they can" -- which is the credo for a lot of hacking.

You may not have realized when you saw Jacob Appelbaum speak at 29C3 on YouTube that the funny name meant 29th Congress of the Chaos Computer Club in Germany. In this speech, titled "Not My Department," he openly recruits those computer programmers who are working for governments in what he views as "surveillance states" in the West to come "from the dark side" (as he sees their lawful activity) into the "light" -- the dark underground world of anarchist coders he represents.

At the time of the speech, in December 2012, he may have already known that Edward Snowden existed, because Snowden supposedly first contacted Glenn Greenwald and then Laura Poitras that time -- and she would have undoubtedly contacted Appelbaum and asked him to help her verify Snowden's claims and encrypt the hacked files involved. Perhaps he even helped create a wish list of what would be best to hack.

But looking at this speech superficially as just one of the literally hundreds of speeches Appelbaum has given all around the world at various hacker fests misses an important point: the Chaos Computer Club has been central to WikiLeaks, to Julian Assange and his colleagues, and to the Snowden affair and his defection to Moscow.

And, as they say, perhaps it is no accident, comrades, because the CCC has a history of dealing with the KGB, even selling the KGB hacked files from Western governments for drugs and money. This sensational past is rarely discussed when WikiLeaks is covered, and when the question is raised as to how WikiLeaks and Russian intelligence are related. The KGB, of course, has a long history of working through leftist German movements, publishing houses and newspapers and taking advantage of the extensive ties between Germany and Russia throughout history.

LEIGH AND HARDING ON CCC

In their book WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy, David Leigh and Luke Harding devote only one page to the Chaos Computer Club and its Congress, as if it were just some obscure nerdy coders' groups not worthy of a second look. They note that Julian Assange and his now estranged colleague WikiLeaks colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg met at the 24th Congress in 2007. Ultimately, Domscheit-Berg was to break with Assange.

It is the foundation formed by the CCC founder Wau Holland-Moritz, now deceased, that forms the basis for WikiLeaks fund-raising to this day at a time when US payments processors refuse to take donations for WikiLeaks because it is the subject of a grand jury investigation involving the theft of classified government files.

Leigh and Harding write:

Chaos Computer Club members at the Berlin Congress such as Domscheit-Berg along with his Dutch hacker colleague Rop Gonggrijp had mature talents that proved to be crucial to the development of Assange's guerilla project.

They go on to explain that Assange tried to shed the hacker label himself, despite his own past prosecution for hacking, saying it was "mostly deployed by the Russian mafia to steal your grandmother's bank accounts."

Oh, not just the Russian mafia. The Russian state, which is commingled with the mafia, of course, which we know from Luke Harding's other books. But they leave it at that in this book.

ANDY GREENBERG ON CCC

Andy Greenberg, the staff writer for Forbes who writes about cybersecurity, hackers, cryptography and the Internet (his book contains a cryptogram that three hackers have already broken), likely understands hackers more than these other two journalists despite their foreign and domestic affairs chops. He is famous for getting an early and long interview of Assange himself for Forbes. And for his book This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World's Information, published in 2012, Greenberg went and spent a lot of time hanging out with the German hackers, even attending the CCC, and of all things, even stumbling on the famous WikiLeaks co-conspirator who goes by the name of The Architect and learning his identity (which in true crypto-kid fashion, he doesn't reveal to us).

As much as I appreciate Greenberg's skillful reporting, to get to his sources, and to gain his proximity, he has to "get in" with these hackers and gain their trust -- which is why he always seems rather admiring of them even as he occasionally criticizes them. I used to think this was a reporter's pose to get the story; I no longer think that. It's just not that he endlessly reports and never judges, if the alibi is that reporters aren't supposed to judge; it's that he too often celebrates, and that's simply unacceptable in a moral universe.

But the Chaos Computer Club isn't a moral universe, except in the sense of "thieves' law" as in the Russian prisons and mafias.

JACOB APPELBAUM, THE CCC AND ASSANGE

Greenberg has a good deal more material on the CCC in his book, and in the chapter titled "The Onion Routers," he covers Jacob Appelbaum's connection to the group.

When Appelbaum returned from New Orleans, his tour through two levels of hell had left him more committed than ever to the liberating powers of technology. But he had yet to find the community that would be his own cypherpunks, the crypto-obsessed peers who would enwrap him in a larger movement and push him to greater feats of crypto-anarchy.

That group would be the Chaos Computer Club.

In many ways, the CCC had progressed years ahead of Tim May and Eric Hughes' crypt0-liberation movement in California. Founded by the Germany hacker luminary Wau Holland in 1981, the hamburgand erlin-based nonprofit had been demonstrating the insecurity of public computer systems as early as 1984, when its hackers used the home terminal system created by the German postal system to transfer the equivalent of $50,000 from a bank to the CCC's accounts. (The money was given back in a public ceremony the next day.) With a true survelilance state looming just over the Berlin Wall, privacy, antiauthoritarianism, and the need for strong crypto had been steep into the group's core.

That sort of statement is exactly the sort of thing that exasperates so with Greenberg's writing. Just because they were next door to East Germany doesn't mean this group did anything to liberate East Germany; their focus then as now was myopically on the West and the "surveillance state" they feared and loathed was the US and its allies in Western Europe.

A year after his father's death in December before Christmas, Appelbaum flew to the CCC in Berlin, writes Appelbaum, engrossed with "the same problem that had troubled Julian Assange years earlier, one central to any activist who believes in the power of cryptography: how to keep encrypted data encrypted, even when authorities are standing over the user, rubber hose in hand, demanding the key." (The reference is to a program invented by Assange in 1997 actually titled "Rubberhose" that was written so that no torturer would be motivated to torture to get the key.)

In his talk that year, Appelbaum derided Apple for its lack of security and then evidently independently came to the problem of "violent key extraction" which was Assange's invention. Tackling the problem of a torturer who is never satisfied "Alice" or "Bob" have told the truth, he suggested that there be Mutually Assured Information Destruction (MAID) so that if the victim, in prison, doesn't check into their account, their keys automatically delete and the torturer knows that. One hopes.

"That drew Appelbaum into Assange's circle albeit indirectly," says Greenberg; another hacker, Ralf-Philipp Winmann, who had developed Rubberhose with Assange earlier, debated Appelbaum at the Congress and then they agreed to meet later.

Writes Greenberg about the first connection between Assange and Appelbaum:

Appelbaum became a CCC regular, and Assange would attend the next year to introduce a project he was working on: WikiLeaks

Friends say they met at that wintry Berlin conference [emphasis added]. Their paths must have felt uncannily parallel: broken, wayward childhoods. IQs beyond those of the hated authorities that tried to exert power over their lives and a belief in the redemptive power of cryptography to defeat those forces.

Sigh. You would never catch me writing a paragraph like that! Frustratingly, Greenberg doesn't directly give the year in this account but if we are to believe Wikipedia, it was 2007 -- meaning Appelbaum's first contact with the CCC was 2006.

APPELBAUM IN BED WITH ASSANGE

And then he writes this, which also can be used to figure the first date as 2006:

By Appelbaum's fourth year at the conference, they [Assange and he] had become close. Appelbuam told me he woke up on New Year's Day after the Twenty-Sixth Chaos Communications Congress in bed with Assange and two women. "That's how we rolled in 2010," he says smiling. (He later clarifies that they had busied themselves the night before with programming, not sex, and slept in different beds. "I can dream," he adds.)

He told Greenberg this was "the start of a good friendship." Indeed.

So Jacob Appelbaum has been in bed with Assange, perhaps only figuratively, for nearly seven years. That's plenty of time to plan and execute many things, including quite possibly the recruitment of an NSA contractor to hack the United States and then defect to Russia. Appelbaum did not spring into the story of Snowden suddenly only in the spring of this year; Laura Poitras had relied on him for years to help her with crypto, ever since they were both traveling to Iraq at the same time in 2004-2005.

Greenberg goes on to attend a Chaos Computer Congress in a tent in the mud and rain in an abandoned East German army base -- fitting. He tells the fascinating story of interviewing Domscheit-Berg just as he is trying to launch a leaks site in competition with WikiLeaks, from which he has departed bitterly on bad terms in September 2010, with a left-wing German newspaper Die Tagezeitung. But it's a flop, and Tag's editor Reinter Metzger leaves "extremely pissed off." Ultimately, in a series of dramas, involving claims that Domscheit-Berg took files that "belonged" to that info-leaking liberator WikiLeaks gang that had stolen them in the first place, the CCC ends up holding a council and expelling Domscheit-Berg, after he is interrogated by a number of hacker elders including the Electronic Frontier Foundation's John Gillmore. Among the judges who rules to expel Domscheit-Berg (and later, take him back in after a sufficient period of exile) is Andy Muller-Maguhn -- who, along with Jacob Appelbaum, was co-author with Julian Assange of Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet. Muller-Maguhn accused Domscheit-Berg of working with Western intelligence agencies -- a charge D-B laughed off in an interview with Greenberg, making a counter-charge that Muller-Maguhn himself had relationships with government agencies through sales in his CryptoPhone company.

Greenberg goes into more detail than most about the internal WikiLeaks crisis that led first to an accidental leak of the key, then a download of all the documents, then to The Architect and Domscheit-Berg destroying the files by throwing away the keys to them.

While Greenberg nails it by calling Camp, as the hackers call CCC a "colder, wetter Burning Man for the radical geek elite," he does not describe its ancient history involving the KGB, when a young German hacker Karl Koch and others contacted the KGB on their own, and sold their hacked files for money and drugs -- Koch was said to be a cocaine addict.

THE CONSPIRACY LOONS' MINEFIELD

To get that sordid story, you have to go to other books and old website archives -- and first try to skirt the minefield of the Wayne Madsen conspiracy sort of stuff -- which as we know is so radioactive that the Guardian deleted an article using this former NSA loon as a source the minute they realized where the story came from. Wayne Madsen believes that the Chaos Computer Club hackers cooperating with the Soviets were under the watch of none other than Robert Hanssen, one of the CIA's most famous defectors to Russia, and that's why they didn't come to light right away. I haven't found that story anywhere else, and it definitely needs checking. Anybody? I have no use for Wayne Madsen and I "get it" about him totally, thanks; I place this link here merely as part of the gorgeous mosaic around this story.

In addition to Wayne Madsen, there's another conspiracy writer, Daniel Estulin, who has written a book, Deconstructing WikiLeaks. He is a Russian emigre from the Soviet era who claims his father was a dissident and that he was tortured and imprisoned by the KGB. I never heard of him, I don't see the name in any Soviet political prisoners' list known at the time or since, and I wonder if the story is true, or at least true in all its elements. Estulin says he and his family fled Russia in 1980. That would have been rare indeed, as the detente period of the 1970s when some Soviet Jews and various dissidents were allowed to leave was pretty much over by then - it was very difficult to get out unless you were a high official allowed to travel. In any event, for what it's worth, Estulin writes in this book -- although Amazon won't let you see the whole page -- that Jacob Appelbaum was in touch with some hacker named Zatko and Dirk Brzezinski of the CCC. To be continued.

It was in 1989 that some computer hackers were suspected of working with foreign intelligence agencies, including the Soviet KGB, to break into western defense computers. Through a link provided by the Chaos Computer Club, a group of German hackers — Karl Koch, aka "Hagbard;" Markus Hess, aka "Urmel;" Hans Heinrich Hubner, aka "Pengo;" and Dirk-Otto Brezinski, aka "DOB" – teamed up with hackers at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and in Melbourne, Australia to penetrate U.S. military computers. It was Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory system administrator Clifford Stoll who first discovered the hackers’ portal into military computers — at the University of Bremen via the German DATEX-P network into Lawrence Berkeley via Tymnet and out into some 400 military computers from the Ramstein Airbase in Germany to Fort Buckner, Okinawa and the OPTIMIS database at the Pentagon. Koch, or "Hagbard," was found burned to death with gasoline in a forest near Celle, West Germany in 1989. Police ruled the death a suicide.

Melbourne, you say? What was the teen-age Assange doing then? And of course you can go back to Clifford Stoll's own book, the Cuckoo's Egg, and the film made of the story at the time, even before the modern Internet, about how a young computer scientist found hackers in government computers who were selling information to the KGB, and eventually, through persistence, persuaded US law-enforcement to catch them.

An interesting aspect of the Cuckoo's Egg gives us a clue as to how the KGB's successor in Russia today, the FSB or its sister agencies, could be doubling up on Snowden and checking his bona fides through their other existing moles in the NSA -- which as I theorized, could be how the Independent story could have happened:

The hacker's name was Markus Hess, and he had been engaged for some years in selling the results of his hacking to the SovietKGB. There was ancillary proof of this when a Hungarianspy
contacted the fictitious SDInet at LBL by mail, based on information he
could only have obtained through Hess (apparently this was the KGB's
method of double-checking to see if Hess was just making up the
information he was selling them).

You can find references to these German hackers in the archives of the Internet's earliest forums.